Actors - The Truman Show

Home > Listing Index > Actors > The Truman Show

	Actors - The Truman Show

The Truman Show (1998) is a movie directed by Peter Weir, written by Andrew Niccol, and starring Jim Carrey. Niccol was due to direct the film until Carrey was signed. It was felt that Carrey's $12 million salary was too great an investment to leave in the hands of a second-time film director, and Weir was drafted. The plot takes many ideas from Philip K. Dick's 1959 novel Time Out of Joint, as well as the 1960 Twilight Zone episode A World of Difference.

Plot

The film is set in a hypothetical world, where an entire town is dedicated to a continually running television soap opera. All but one of the participants are actors. Only the central character, Truman Burbank (Carrey), is unaware that he lives in a constructed reality for the entertainment of those outside. The film follows his discovery of his situation and his attempts to escape. On the surface level, it criticizes greed, portraying people who would do anything for fame and money. Central characters fake friendship to Truman, and in the case of his "wife", bury their real feelings of disgust.

Truman was chosen out of five unwanted babies to be a TV star. He is an explorer and wants to find a girl who was caught back in college trying to explain things to him. Eventually, however, Truman begins to figure out that it's all fake. Everyone tries to reassure him, but Truman has already reached the point of no return, and escapes.

Along his path to truth and escape Truman encounters obstacles placed in his way, including choreographed traffic jams, inability to book any trips out of town, buying a bus ticket out of town where the bus suddenly breaks down, a "leak at the plant", a long bridge to cross (Truman is afraid of water), and an artificially created hurricane-force storm on the "ocean". He finally reaches the edge of the constructed reality and exits via a door in the wall, to an audience of millions.

Cast

Jim Carrey
- Truman Burbank
Laura Linney
- Meryl, Truman's "wife"
Noah Emmerich
- Marlon
Natascha McElhone
- Lauren/Sylvia
Holland Taylor
- Truman's "mother"
Brian Delate - Truman's "father"
Blair Slater - Young Truman
Peter Krause
- Lawrence, Truman's boss
Heidi Schanz - Vivien
Ron Taylor
- Ron
Don Taylor - Don
Ted Raymond - Spencer
Ed Harris
- Christof, the creator of the show
Paul Giamatti
- Control room director
Adam Tomei - Control room director
Harry Shearer
- Mike Michaelson

Interpretations

The Truman Show can be considered a parody of the soap opera genre and reality television. However, it is important to note that this movie appeared a few years before the reality TV craze set in.

Truman levels a critique of contemporary American society, where our lives and identities are increasingly structured by hegemonic ideas principally trafficked in mass media.

There are elements of theology and ontology present in The Truman Show. Some believe it draws heavily on themes of Gnosticism. Gnosticism teaches that the world we live in is essentially false - the creation of a somewhat evil and twisted god called the Demiurge. Another religious theme connects the film to the Book of Job, where Satan, in a wager with God, puts Job through a series of hardships to see if he will renounce God's name. Another possible religious allegory could be that of the Garden of Eden, where Adam (Truman) eats from the tree of knowledge and, (discovering the unreality he lives in), leaves Eden (the perfect town Truman lives in).

Perhaps most notably, the film exhibits many similarities to Plato's allegory of the cave, in which prisoners forced to view shadows on a wall in an underground grotto come to believe that this is reality; an escaped prisoner would at first be unable to perceive the real world, with the shadows as his only frame of reference.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for The Truman Show ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article The Truman Show; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay